Liberals seeing and hearing no evil about Obama’s missteps *UPDATED*

I don’t know why I didn’t blog about the Charles Freeman story.  Certainly it had all the perfect elements for yet another point of concern about the Obama administration:  the Director of National Intelligence (!) selects Freeman, the Obama administration disclaims about knowledge of the selection, and Freeman turns out to be both a lunatic and a paid shill of the Saudi and Chinese governments.  There’s a guy you want whispering in the President’s ear about the direction our foreign policy should go.   The fact is, so many others were blogging about it, that I had nothing to add.  (And speaking of others, here’s an excellent summary of the Freeman debacle and why it matters.)

Anyway, Freeman is just another in an almost uninterrupted line of stories about the Obama administration screwing up — yet again — when it comes to selecting someone to serve the administration.  We’re getting used to the sordid tales of tax cheats and wackos.  The more interesting story about Charles Freeman, I think, is that the New York Times refused to cover the story.  (This, again, is something other bloggers have been pointing out with some consistency during the last three weeks).  The Times, after all, calls itself the paper of record, and boasts that it prints all the news that’s fit to print.  Apparently it did not deem Freeman newsworthy and the Times wanted no record of his existence.

Another story that’s been flying almost entirely outside the parameters of MSM coverage is the British dismay (and, in some quarters, outrage) over the cavalier treatment their country and their Prime Minister received from the Obama administration.  You all know the details, so I’ll summarize:  returned Churchill’s busts; gave incredibly cheap and tacky gifts; and rejected meetings and phone calls, all explained away by Obama’s fatigue after the incredible burden of a whole six weeks of governing.

That the MSM isn’t talking about either Freeman or the deliberate insult to Britain matters.  It matters in part because it proves Obama wasn’t lying when he said he handle foreign policy differently from Bush.  (The problem being that many people understood this to mean that he’d hire competent, honest people, and that he’d create more friends abroad, not more enemies.)  It also matters because media silence about important facts means that large swaths of the voting public never learn these facts.

As it happened, I didn’t raise the Freeman matter with my resident liberal, Mr. Bookworm, but I did find sufficiently amusing (in a grotesque way) Obama’s England fumbles to ask him if he’d heard about it.

“No,” he hadn’t.

“Really?  It’s been all over the front page of every British newspaper.  They’re very upset about it,” I said.

He asked, “What are they upset about?”

I gave to him a slightly extended version of the same little summary I set out above above.  Mr. Bookroom’s reply spoke volumes:

“I don’t believe that.  That’s just stupid gossip magazine stuff.”  In other words, if it’s not in the New York Times or on NPR, it’s not the news that’s fit to print.

I gently reminded him that, as I’d said at the start of our talk, the story is front page material in England, across the political spectrum.  The conversation harmoniously ended there, with me hoping that, perhaps, he got just an inkling of the fact that his chosen media outlets aren’t being completely honest with him.

UPDATE:  I barely finished posting the above, and I read at Power Line that the Washington Post is carefully expurgating Freeman’s communications to make him sound like a beleaguered victim, rather than an antisemitic nut case.

UPDATE II:  And here’s the reason why the MSM ignores these stories:  they don’t agree with their narrative.

UPDATE III:  Kathy Shaidle, who blogs regularly at Five Feet of Fury (I love that name), also weighs in on just how heinous Freeman was — which also highlights just how much the MSM hid from the public.  And this time they weren’t protecting a candidate, they were protecting a president.

UPDATE IV:  Vaguely related, so I’ll throw it in here:  apropos the fatigue of the job rendering Obama incapable of ordinary civility, Small Dead Animals captures the fact that Obama was never willing to do the grunt work that went with the title.